Mayflower 400
The unmanned trimaran – a ship with three hulls – is still rocking gently in the Bay of Plymouth off the British coast. It is called “Mayflower 400” in memory of the sailing ship that brought the first emigrants to America in 1620. The only thing the new high-tech ship has in common with the Mayflower sailboat from back then is its name and route.
Instead of passengers, the trimaran has a lot of technology on board, artificial intelligence (AI) takes on the role of the captain. On its three-week voyage from Plymouth in the UK to Plymouth on the US east coast, the ship, which is equipped with solar panels and robotic rudders, will examine marine pollution, analyze plastic in the water and track down marine mammals.
“A ship with no people on board enables scientists to expand their observation area,” says Rosie Lickorish from IT company IBM, one of the partners in the project. 80 percent of the underwater world is still unexplored. The oceans have the “greatest influence” on the global climate, says Brett Phaneuf from the ProMare organization and one of the initiators of the project.
Numerous technology and service providers and hundreds of people from countries such as India, Switzerland and the USA contributed to the project, says Phaneuf. Without this collaboration, the Mayflower 400 would have cost ten times what ProMare had invested around one million dollars.
The non-profit organization wants to make the data collected during the Atlantic crossing available to scientists free of charge. The experience gained from the project could also be useful for the future of commercial shipping.
The maiden voyage of the intelligent ship had to be postponed for several months due to the pandemic. Because there are no people on board, there is an important advantage: “Nobody on board will be bored, tired or sick on the voyage. So it can last as long as science needs, ”says Phaneuf in the port of departure.
After a year of construction, the 15-meter-long and nine-ton boat was ready. The development of the “Smart Captain”, the artificial intelligence on board, took longer. The computer first had to learn from thousands of photos to recognize obstacles on the sea. At sea, the ship was trained to avoid collisions.
By playing through a wide variety of scenarios, the ship can learn to differentiate between “safe and unsafe” maneuvers, says software engineer Ollie Thompson. In the event of mistakes, it can correct itself “and thereby learn independently”. However, the “Mayflower 400” has not yet been tested in rough seas. So far she has mastered waves 50 meters high in simulations.
The artificial intelligence of the boat is also crucial for the scientific experiments. “She was trained for hundreds of hours with audio to recognize marine mammals,” says Lickorish. This is the only way to obtain information about the distribution of the population in the open ocean.
Analyzes of the chemical composition of the water, measurements of the sea level and the collection of microplastic samples are also among the tasks of the “Mayflower 400”. Although the ship is supposed to find its way across the Atlantic completely autonomously, a team from the mainland will monitor it around the clock – always ready to assist Captain KI in an emergency.